Our muse the mayor: Artwork inspired by Rob Ford is easy to spot, but why?

He scales the CN Tower, a suited King Kong menacing Hogtown with a streetcar teetering in his clutches. In this Web cartoon, his belly tugs at his shirt buttons. They strain not to pop off.

A local newspaper political cartoonist has him as an elephant one day, and later as a sumo wrestler. To a local graffiti artist, he is both the egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty and the balloon-bellied Tweedledee (or perhaps Tweedledum?). To another he is a frog-mouthed, roly-poly quasi-monster who devours pink bicycles.

Across genres and media, Rob Ford may be caricatured more frequently and viciously than any local public figure in memory. He’s a credible candidate for the second-most ridiculed politician in Canada, after the Prime Minister.

What makes the Mayor such a tantalizing muse to the city’s visual artists?

Some of them say Ford is prone to gaffes, which rouses them to take aim. The graffiti artist known as Deadboy, for example — creator of the Humpty Dumpty and Tweedledee/Tweedledum graffiti images — says Ford’s clumsier moments are “inspiring.”

“As much as I hate him, it’s great fodder,” says the Toronto-based artist, who spoke with the Post on the condition his real name remain a secret.

“The thing about Rob Ford is that, in many ways, he behaves in a caricature fashion,” says Alice Klein, editor and CEO of NOW magazine. “He’s very lampoonable.”

Ford’s mixed but generally uneasy relationship with art and artists can’t be helping him, either. (For example, University of Toronto music students have created an “absurdist” opera about Rob Ford, set to debut on Jan. 22. Does anyone expect it to be flattering?) Make an enemy of artists and they will fight back the best way they know how.

But it’s hard to imagine Ford would be such a large target if he weighed less. He is a big guy. You know it, local artists and illustrators certainly know it, and the mayor doesn’t shy away from it. The man once referred to himself as “300 pounds of fun.”
Caricatures of the Mayor often inflate him from the rotund reality to flabby fantasy. While some portraits are respectful, others imagine him as a big, fat monster, a blob of grotesque proportions.

Like him or not, surely it is not clever to point out over and over again that the Mayor is a fat man. And it can all seem hypocritical, given that Ford’s opponents tend to come from the political left, which often talks about tolerance for all — different body types included.

Few Ford portraits have been more brazen about the man’s body than the cover of NOW last March. Through the magic of photo editing software, the free weekly magazine pasted Ford’s head on the body of a hefty male model clad in boxer shorts. The cover advertised a story on “The naked truth about Rob Ford.” Beyond that, it did not attempt to dress up the Mayor’s digital disrobing as insightful commentary. It looked like a poke at Ford’s flesh for the sake of a surface-deep gag.NOW magazine’s editor, however, argues the image was about peeling back the exterior of Ford’s administration and “exposing some uncomfortable truths.”

And even if the cover reminded everyone that Ford is overweight, Klein says, it was in keeping with the long tradition of political caricature. Furthermore, she argues it served the greater purpose of attracting attention to articles of deeper substance.
“Our job is to be a bit fearless and generate interest around the stories we write. Sometimes, we have to go for something that’s fun and grabby and interesting — and perhaps open ourselves to criticism from all sides. That’s fine. It’s debate. It’s discussion,” Klein explains.

“We have no interest in gratuitously calling anybody out on weight or appearance issues. That’s not the point.”

Nancy Beiman believes Ford lined up to be roasted when he got into politics. An animator and illustrator who worked for Disney and now teaches storyboarding at Sheridan College, she draws Ford on occasion for pleasure and political catharsis. Like a lot of artists, she finds him tons of fun to draw. He pulls a lot of funny faces, she says, and “looks like an angry potato.”

Her caricature of Ford as the 2012 New Year’s baby, for instance, morphs him into a repulsive, Jabba the Hutt-like blob. But Beiman also says it is not her intent to make fun of Ford for his weight. “I come from a family of large people, so I don’t want to just target that.”

The tradition of political portraiture simply insists on incorporating any physical defects into the image, she says. “Caricature is not pretty. It’s not meant to be polite.”
While some illustrators and cartoonists may be judicious in their Ford renditions, practitioners of graffiti — another overtly political art form — have taken direct aim at him, especially since Ford’s widely publicized crackdown on graffiti last year.
The executive director of a street art organization says there’s an irony in that.

When Ford sat down with stakeholders to discuss how to rid the city of spray-painted vandalism, explains Stefan Lialias of Street Art Showcase, the parties found a compromise. The populist conservative Mayor, small-business owners and counterculture graffiti artists discovered a common libertarian streak, agreeing that the owner of a building ought to be able to commission whatever art he or she chooses for it.

As of Jan. 1, a store owner can hire a spray can artist to create a mural to keep the taggers at bay. “You and myself, if I’m an artist, we can negotiate and put up something without any type of city approval or involvement,” Lialias explains. “You don’t even have to tell the city.”

As well, the so-called “Graffiti Alley” behind Queen Street West between Portland and Spadina has been grandfathered as a graffiti-permitted area (an informal art amnesty had been in place for years).

Certain Ford policies have made life easier for graffiti artists, then. Will it inspire them to create complimentary Ford portraits?

It seems doubtful, given Ford’s unpopularity in places such as Queen West for reasons that go well beyond graffiti policy. “Would any one of these guys have the courage to stand in front of their peers and do something flattering?” Lialias asks, rhetorically.
Deadboy may someday benefit from the graffiti plans, but he has no intention of lightening up on Ford. His stencil-and-spray-paint mayoral mockeries are among the most sophisticated and recognizable on the street. He insists that despite the round-shaped characters he chooses to lampoon Ford, he does not mean to make a big issue of the man’s physique.

“I don’t want to throw that punch. I want to be a little smarter about it,” Deadboy says. “When I did the Humpty Dumpty, I had a couple accusations of using his weight [against him]. But I used the original [19th-century] John Tenniel illustrations from Through the Looking-Glass. That’s the shape of the egg. It just happens that his roundish face suits that rather well. Same with Tweedledee/Tweedledum. I take that as divine intervention. It was meant to be.”

Deadboy says it is Ford’s verbal and other gaffes — rather than his corpulence — that compel him to create more stencils. “I don’t think I have much control over it.”
The outspoken Ford may be a good thing for artists in a way neither side ever intended. As long as he remains mayor, he will probably keep inspiring people like Deadboy.